ActionAid Welcomes Commitment by African Leaders to End Hunger by 2025

Monday, January 29, 2018

African leaders meeting at the African Union in Addis Ababa, yesterday renewed their commitment to end hunger on the continent by 2025.

The pledge came following the publishing of the Malabo Declaration Biennial Report which revealed that only 10 of the 47 countries that provided data had met or surpassed their target of providing at least 10% of the national budget to agriculture spending.

David Adama, from ActionAid’s Public Financing for Agriculture project, said:

“African governments have shown some progress, but a lot remains to be done if they’re to meet their commitment of ending hunger by 2025.

“ActionAid welcomes the publishing of this report, as it provides useful data for tracking African countries’ progress on meeting their hunger targets. Local farmers will use the report to track how their governments are meeting their pledges and to make sure that the services they’re providing meet their needs.

“Climate change continues to push up levels of poverty and hunger on the African continent, yet only Mauritania has budgetary provisions in place for resilience, disaster preparedness policies and early warning response systems. This is something all African governments must fix if they’re serious about meeting their hunger-busting goals.

ActionAid is calling on all African countries to put in place a clear timeline to progressively achieve the minimum 10% of budget expenditure on agriculture and to start a process of publishing a gender disaggregated budget to measure the impact of these policies on the smallholder women farmers who produce the majority of the continent’s food.

ENDS

Editors' notes

ActionAid’s Public Financing for Agriculture project seeks to better connect farmers with the agriculture support systems in their own countries. Rather than making farmers reliant on handouts, the project provides training for farmers so that they can better understand how to access government support and how their national agriculture budgets are put together. https://www.actionaidusa.org/work/african-farmers-track-government-money/